Grandma just wants a beer. She's had a minor heart attack, some broken ribs and she's receiving morphine. But Grandma has one thing on her mind.

"You got a beer," she asks?

It's the kind of intimate moment filmmaker Lisa Cerasoli captures in her film "50 Days with Alzheimer's," screening at the inaugural Life and Death Matters Festival in Boulder during the first four days of September.

Cerasoli wrote a book about her grandmother, titled "Nora Jo Fades Away." The book won the 2010 Paris Book Festival Award for Best Biography. But Cerasoli thought she could reach a wider audience if she documented on film what daily life was like caring for Nora Jo, who lived with Cerasoli and her family in Marquette, Mich., as she lived with Alzheimer's Disease the final three years of her life.

So one day, Cerasoli went to Walmart and bought a flip camera.

"I thought, 'We're going to catch the funny moments and the crazy moments and the scary moments,'" Cerasoli said in an interview with the Camera. "We're going to catch it all."

The result is a poignant, hour-long documentary that details the difficulties and joys of caring for someone with Alzheimer's.

"50 Days" is one of 30 feature-length and short-form films that will be screened during the Life and Death Matters Festival. Nine plays will be staged, as well.

Erin Kelly and Karen van Vuuren, who first met when they worked at a hospice center in Boulder, brewed up the idea for the festival over a cup of coffee.

"She and I started talking about how our culture shies away from this taboo topic of death, dying and aging," Kelly said. "We started talking about how film is a great medium to educate and bring awareness to other topics. So why not create some sort of evening to use film to educate about death?"

Kelly lived and worked in the film and theater industry in Los Angeles for several years before relocating to Boulder. Van Vuuren operates Natural Transitions, a non-profit dying, death and after-death care business, and in 2007 she produced the film "Dying Wish," a documentary about a dying doctor's decision to eschew food and liquids in order to ease his death.

But a film festival solely about death would be a hard sell, the two thought. So they expanded the idea, adding a live theater component and including a wider range of topics.

Lisa Cerasoli, left, with her grandmother, Nora Jo Cerasoli. Nora Jo is the subject of Cerasoli's film, "50 Days with Alzheimer's" screening at this week's Life and Death Matters Festival.
(Lisa Cerasoli)

The festival received more than 200 film and 35 play submissions, Kelly said. Along with Cerasoli's film, titles set to be screened include: "The Edge of Joy," Dawn Sinclair Shapiro's look inside a maternity ward; "Fly Away," Janet Grillo's documentary about a single mother raising a teenager with autism; "Little Town of Bethlehem," Jim Hanon's chronicle of three men of different faiths living in the Middle East; and Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot's claymation piece, "Mary and Max," about an 8-year-old boy in Australia who is pen pals with an obese 44-year-old man with Asperger's Syndrome in New York.

"The filmmaker has had festivals call her and say we love your film, but our hands are tied and we can't screen it because of the nature of what it is saying about vaccinations," Kelly said.

Among the plays to be performed during the festival is Rhea MacCallum's short one-act "Independence Day."

The semi-autobiographical piece depicts a final meeting between a mother and daughter as the mother is dying. MacCallum, who lives in Downey, Calif., said she wrote the play a few years after her own mother died from breast cancer.

MacCallum said writing the play loosely based on her mother was an emotionally charged process. But it was cathartic.

"It's turning a negative into a positive," she said. "As well as being able to continue to celebrate her life -- her personality and her attitude. Those are the things I tried to capture in the play. To some degree, it's an attempt to keep her spirit alive."

Kelly said encountering some of the subjects the plays and films at the Life and Death Matters Festival could be emotional for audiences. That's why the festival will host talkback sessions and/or workshops around each of the screenings or performances.

On the list of educators scheduled to take part in the festival programming is Temple Grandin, whose life with autism inspired an Emmy Award-winning film.

"A lot of the programs are pretty meaty," Kelly said. "It's important to us to be able to hold the space for those taboo topics and be able to facilitate if it brings up anything in the individual viewer so that they hear about the tools to work through it.

"The other part of (including talkbacks and workshops) is that's why we started the festival to begin with. We wanted more information and awareness on all of these topics."

Spreading awareness about Alzheimer's is what prompted Cerasoli to document what it was like for her family to take in Cerasoli's grandmother as she succumbed to the disease.

According to the Alzheimer's Association, a non-profit advocacy group, 5.4 million Americans live with Alzheimer's now, and that number is expected to grow to 16 million by the year 2050.

"This isn't going away," Cerasoli said. "This is only getting bigger. This is going to cause a lot of problems in this country on so many levels, from care and placement to family drama."

Cerasoli isn't sentimental about her and her husband's decision to take Nora Jo into their home -- Cerasoli's grandmother lived with the couple and their two children for nearly three years until she died in December 2010. Caring for Grandma was very difficult. But along with the weight of the situation, there were many moments of lightness.

Cerasoli cackled with laughter as she recalled her grandmother's taste for beer -- a taste that never waned.

"Everybody has their thing and my Grandma's happened to be beer," Cerasoli said. "That was something we dealt with throughout her illness. She was on her deathbed asking for beer."

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